KEN PLUME: In listening to the album, it’s surprising to me how many voice people are actually musicians on the side, or have musical aspirations, or do musical things that no one even knows about.
KENNY: Yeah, that’s true. Obviously Billy West is a session musician-level guitarist.
KEN PLUME: And Jess Harnell…
KENNY: Somebody like Tara Strong is a Broadway-level singer… and who else… the Little Mermaid there, Jodi Benson, was a Broadway performer. It’s not that surprising when you… most voiceover people have a knack for mimicry and sounds.
KEN PLUME: And pitch and manipulation.
KENNY: Yeah, we’re very sound-oriented. It’s just what we do. Luckily, there’s an occupation that… well, I just mentioned Jerry Lee Lewis, and I just drove by a big construction fence with pictures of Jerry Lee Lewis pasted all over it.
KEN PLUME: Is that for his new album?
KENNY: His new album, yeah, where the piano’s on fire – and it’s not an electric piano, by the way. We wanted to get him on this record but we didn’t have the time or budget, because Andy produced his record.
KEN PLUME: That’s what the follow up is for.
KENNY: Exactly! Exactly. So yeah, I guess it’s really not that surprising, as a lot of what you’re doing is just kinda dealing with notes and sounds and combinations of sounds, which is pretty much what music is. A combination of sounds in a given order. A lot of times when you’re trying to voice match whoever – the voice matching thing in particular where you’re trying to sound exactly like Sterling Holloway or Daws Butler or Mel Blanc, because they want to keep the franchise going after the original guy is dead… I wonder who’s gonna take over for me? (laughing)
KEN PLUME: He’s already working right now.
KENNY: It’s probably somebody that’s not even born yet.
KEN PLUME: How does that make you feel?
KENNY: Yeah… wow.
KEN PLUME: That one day 50 years from now, someone’s going, “God, I just can’t get how Kenny did Spongebob!”
KENNY: (laughing) Or there’ll be eight thousand people going, “Yeah, that’s easy. I can do that.”
KEN PLUME: “It’s one of the simplest voices ever!”
KENNY: (laughing) But it’s fun. A lot of the voiceover people definitely relish the opportunity to do something that’s musical. You know, a song. And B, a song that’s – in the case of the Spongebob show – a song that’s longer than 30 seconds or 20 seconds. You know what I mean?
KEN PLUME: Right.
KENNY: Like, songs exist on the Spongebob show mostly to provide a quick laugh by spoofing a different genre, like a fake Disney song, or something like that, for 20 seconds. There was an episode called “Spongebob Lost in Time” where Squidward was a jester and they were singing in that, but you were sort of making fun of Medieval minstrels or whatever. The cast really dug the opportunity to really sink their teeth into something that was a little more substantive. Like Rodger Bumpass with Squidward’s song on the album, “Superior,” just like kicked ass, you know what I’m saying? And he was happy –
he got the biggest production on the record, it’s like a full… we wanted his cut to sound like some Cuban ballroom orchestra in 1933 in a hotel or something, and he kicked ass. And Clancy Brown, his song musically didn’t have as much going on in terms of the melody or whatever, it’s kind of a Rex Harrison kind of talk-singing thing. I guess you could call it a recitation more than a song, but he makes his voice go to so many places and switches it up so much, because he’s a really good actor. You know what I’m saying? All the ass kicking he did playing in Shawshank and The Guardian and all those movies, he brought.
KEN PLUME: Only you could get Lex Luthor to sing.
KENNY: Exactly! And he had a blast. He can be cantankerous, but he was great, and Bill Fagerbakke, Patrick, just relished the chance to just jump around and be an idiot, and scream out a Ramones song. Carolyn Lawrence, who plays Sandy, was the one who was the most nervous about singing. Didn’t consider herself a singer, thought, “I can’t sing. I don’t have a good musical ear,” or whatever.
KEN PLUME: Well, based on her performance on the album, she’s a liar.
KENNY: She actually did have a little bit of mic fright, and I said to her, “All you’ve got to do is sound like Sandy. You do that every week. This is Sandy singing, so however you sing as Sandy is how Sandy sings, and it’s all beautiful. It’s all good.” And then she just kicked butt. It was really fun, and again it was a pretty low budget project and we didn’t have much bread to give people, and they were so… they stepped up to the plate for me and just gave above and beyond. And even somebody like Brian Wilson, who was only supposed to do… we were going to let him do as little as he wanted. We were just glad to have him there. And then if he does an “ow” or an “ooh” or an “awooo,” then we’re happy. But he stayed there for a long time and, like, layered on “Doin’ the Krabby Patty” – like, just all the background vocals are him, he just layered it and layered it and layered it and then had a bunch of ideas of his own for background vocals and stuff that we wound up recording.
KEN PLUME: What were those ideas? When you’re sitting there in a room, presented with an idea by Brian Wilson, what is the thought that’s running through your head?
KENNY: Oh, well, the first thought is, it’s Brian Wilson. Do you know what I mean? When Brian Wilson says, (doing Brian Wilson impression) “You know what I think would go good here? I think, like, this note would go here and maybe then I’ll go ooh-ah, ooh-ah…” you listen. There was one thing in there that Paley and I were like – he suggested on the bridge, like just holding a note like a really long time. (doing Brian Wilson) “Like an organ chord. Ooooooooooooo.” We were just like, “I don’t know, that’s kinda weird.” And then we recorded it, and it sounded, of course – it was perfect. It was right. We stood totally corrected when we listened to it back, after he had left. So it’s not even like we were sucking up to him, we were just like, “Oh, okay, we’ll record it but we might not use it,” and then it was like, “Oh my god, he’s so right. That sounds great there.”
KEN PLUME: Was there an intimidation factor at all?
KENNY: You know, there was not an intimidation factor, really. Because he was so nice and genuine and eager to help and he’s got two little daughters that are into Spongebob and stuff, so he was just like, “What do you need?” He was very, very eager and very hardworking. Again, above and beyond the call. In a way it was shocking. Like, “Wow, you’ve been here a long time. You can go now, you know.” And he was just wonderful. He was so… the only intimidation factor for me, was just his body of work looms so large for me personally. Do you know what I mean? He’s just made so much music that’s brought so much happiness and enjoyment to my life. That was intimidating… like, “Wow, this guy’s really… this isn’t like hanging out with somebody who was on Who’s The Boss… This is like Brian Wilson.”
KEN PLUME: It was interesting that, in listening to the album, right off the bat – there are people that attempt to do a Beach Boys sound, and it will seem like some kind of off-kilter pastiche, where it almost seems like a parody, even though they’re desperately trying to be genuine to capture that sound. But on something like “Best Day Ever,” it sounded effortless – to the point where you could actually imagine Brian playing it at his next concert.
KENNY: Yeah, well, that’s very nice of you. Again, that’s something we went for. Obviously we wanted it to be… we did a bunch of pastiches on this record – again just giving props to things that we love… you know – sunny California, The Turtles, Partridge Family type…
KEN PLUME: Byrds, right…
KENNY: And Hillbilly music and bluegrass, which I also love, and Texmex accordion music, which I love…
KEN PLUME: Yeah, but none of the tracks on the album seemed… pastiche can almost be a derogatory term at times, and you avoided that pitfall…
KENNY: Absolutely. Hopefully this doesn’t sound too pretentious, because I’m not saying that these two things are even remotely in the same league, but when you watch Young Frankenstein, you can tell that Mel Brooks truly loves Universal horror movies. Like, it looks so perfect – you know what I mean? I guess you could call that a pastiche, but it’s kind of a spoof and kind of a love letter.
KEN PLUME: But you’re using that to create something that’s wholly unique unto itself. It doesn’t play like a ripoff.
KENNY: We tried to play some aspects of this pretty straight. Our conceit was that Spongebob and his friends have a band. Like the Chipmunks or the Archies or whatever. And this is the album they recorded and these are the songs that they wrote and they brought into band practice. What would Spongebob write a song about? In this universe, Spongebob is real, he exists, and he comes into band practice with a song. What is it? Well, the “Best Day Ever” kind of sums up his philosophy in one song. And it’s so ridiculously positive, like over-the-top crazy positive, and it’s sort of a spoof of insanely positive people, but it’s also kinda heartfelt, too.
KEN PLUME: It’s as if the Beach Boys wrote a Herman’s Hermits song.
KENNY: Right… Partridge Family, Turtles… exactly. It was really a fun exercise, and even before we really got the green light to… even before we had pitched it to Nickelodeon, Paley and I were writing these songs just for fun, and “Let’s see where it takes us.” Squidward would write a song about what a drag it is to be this superior being that has to live in a world where everybody’s too much of a freakin’ moron to know how superior you are. I think everybody kinda feels like that sometimes when you’re dealing with knuckleheads, and Mr. Krabs obviously would sing the Halliburton ode to greed, and that’s like our Brecht/Weill-type song. Just because that’s something else we like. It was really fun. It was really easy and really fun, and I think the main reason for that is that it again goes right back to Steve Hillenburg and the characters just being well thought out and well laid out from the beginning. Like really archetypal characters. Like with the Honeymooners, like we were talking about earlier, you kinda know how their band practice would go. You can kind of picture it and you can kinda see that Patrick would do… you know, he’s a total force of nature, id type character that’s all just… I was gonna say he’s right-brained, but he’s no-brained. So he would just do a one chord “Wild Thing,” Troggs-type/Animals rave up just because he’s so primitive. His music would be very primitive. Linking him and Spongebob up on the Ramones pastiche is another thing that we love. The Ramones are one of my favorite bands and Andy Paley had worked with them on the Rock & Roll High School soundtrack. So we decided to make a Ramones song, and then kinda thought… so many of these guest stars happen by accident. Again, we didn’t really have the time or the budget… like, we thought, “Well, let’s do a Beach Boys type song.” Never thinking that the head Beach Boy would ever really be on the record. We just kinda reached out to him and it happened at the last possible second, and the same with Flaco Jimenez on accordion. It was like well, “We’ll get a guy to play a Flaco Jimenez-type solo here. Maybe we can find somebody who plays like him.” And then I heard that he was playing in LA, like, on Easter Sunday in the afternoon at some Mexican cowboy bar in Whittier, California, like 45 minutes outside of LA. I just went to the show and collared him in the alley outside this gig at this Mexican cowboy bar where he was playing at 3 in the afternoon on Easter Sunday for some crazy reason. Who knows what the story was. Maybe he owed the club owner some money.
KEN PLUME: A booking’s a booking.
KENNY: Yeah, exactly. So a lot of that kinda stuff just happened. The same with Tommy Ramone. In the case of Tommy Ramone and Brian Wilson, Andy Paley had relationships with them where they really like him, and they said, “Sure.” But it was a pretty dang interesting process. And just really… in some ways really easy and fun, but the other advantage you have of working with somebody like Paley is like he’s an old-school Phil Spector… like, he knows… he’s not old school, really. What I meant to say is he’s a student of how all those records were made.
KEN PLUME: He knows the process by which that sound is created…
KENNY: He knows how they did it. And he also knows that you can find a more… like, a quicker way to do it, where probably most people would not even notice that you did it the quick, easier way. But we made it like, “Let’s try to make it the way they did. How would the Beach Boys… On ‘My Tighty Whities,’ let’s really try and make it like Spongebob and his friends are making Pet Sounds,” to the point of us finding… well, three of the musicians on the record actually played on Pet Sounds.
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